How accurate are online symptom checkers?

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Members of the public are increasingly using the internet to research their health concerns. For example, the United Kingdom’s online patient portal for national health information, NHS Choices, reports over 15 million visits per month, and more than a third of adults in the United States regularly use the internet to self diagnose their ailments, using it both for non-urgent symptoms and for urgent symptoms such as chest pain.

Using computerized algorithms, symptom checkers ask users a series of questions about their symptoms or require users to input details about their symptoms themselves. One symptom checker, iTriage, reports 50 million uses each year.

23 symptom checkers that were in English and provided advice across a range of conditions were checked using 45 standardized patient vignettes - which are often used to test medical students knowledge.

They concluded that symptom checkers had deficits in both triage and diagnosis. Triage advice from symptom checkers is generally risk averse, encouraging users to seek care for conditions where self care is reasonable.